A Myth About Turkeys (PG)
Title: A Myth About Turkeys
Author: Dee Laundry
Characters: House, Wilson, OC
Rating: PG
Words: 3392
Summary: Wilson and House wait out the rain.
Notes: Spoilers for the last several episodes of House. Thank you to
nightdog_barks for betaing her own gift. This is for her. ♥
“The thing about motorcycles,” Wilson thinks to himself, “is that they don’t have roofs.”
The downpour started twenty minutes ago, when they were a half-hour outside of the last tiny town they’d seen, and in those twenty minutes, they haven’t seen another tiny town, or a building, or even a bridge to wait the rain out under. Wilson is soaked to the bones, “wetter than a jellyfish,” as his Gran used to say, and House doesn’t look any better off.
He’s starting to get worried that the sand and dust will float right over the road (he has no idea how quicksand is truly formed, but loose detritus plus pounding rain seems as likely a formula as anything), and can’t decide whether to gun it or stop completely and let the clouds pass. House has other ideas, however, and pulls off onto -- oh.
There’s a motel by the side of the road. Wilson hadn’t seen it, which actually isn’t surprising given the worn, beaten grey-brown color of everything involved with the place. The parking lot, the low-slung building, the roof, the windows… they all are the same ancient shade.
By the time he gets his kickstand down, House has already taken off toward what looks to be the motel office. No sign that Wilson can see, unless that dark gray smudge in the far window is a sign, but the door is the only one in the row of -- Wilson counts -- seven that has a bell hanging over it.
The bell tinks as House goes in (the sound is definitely a “tink,” not a ring) and Wilson huddles under the not-very-over overhang by the nearest motel room. He’s still soaked, and freezing, but there are no weird noises coming from any of the rooms, so a sliver of gratitude for the shelter seems in order.
In just a few minutes, House comes back out, helmet tucked under his left arm, and a real metal key attached to a gigantic diamond-shaped piece of plastic dangling from his other hand. House nods toward the door two down from where Wilson’s standing, and Wilson is there in less than a blink.
He hates being this wet.
The room looks like a motel room Wilson could’ve stayed in as a young child -- literally. The furniture, carpet, artwork, TV, and bedspread seem to have been here since the 1970s. He hopes the sheets have been changed since then, at least. He hopes.
“There’s only one bed,” he points out to House, who’s gone into the bathroom.
“You really want to spend the night here?” House retorts, his voice seeming to bounce off the tile.
Point to House. It’s only two in the afternoon and surely the rain will stop soon. They can just get dry, and --
House is naked.
Wilson blinks. The situation stays the same.
House is completely naked: no shirt, no underwear, no socks, nothing. And he’s walking around the room like it’s an everyday thing, being naked. Which, Wilson supposes, is an everyday thing, given that House does shower and/or bathe regularly, but it’s not every day that he does it so insouciantly in front of Wilson. In fact, it is no days that House is naked in front of Wilson insouciantly.
No days. Approximately the same frequency with which Wilson uses the word ‘insouciantly,’ so…
“Put a damn towel on, House, geez!”
“Willikers, Wilson,” House replies in a goofy, no, Goofy voice. “Donald Duck doesn’t wear pants, so why do I gotta? Yuk, yuk!”
Wilson rolls his eyes and flees to the bathroom. Not flees. Manfully strides.
House is right about one thing; the wet clothes have to go. After carefully shutting the door behind himself (because he can handle House’s nudity if it’s one room over), he kicks his boots to the corner of the bathroom, on top of House’s, and peels off the layers of sodden fabric. Ugh. He’ll have a quick shower, and a long dry, and then go see about finding somewhere they can get their clothes clean.
There’s no shampoo in the tub and the soap smells like wood. The water is hot, though, and the 1970s showerhead has never even heard the word ‘low-flow’ so it’s all good. Wilson has some of his optimism back. He’s clean; he’s out of the rain; House has, by the sound of things, found a re-run of a football game on TV. Wilson won’t even bother looking for a Laundromat. They can just hang out in their towels for a while, and throw their clothes over the radiator and in front of the oscillating fan Wilson noticed in the room.
It’s a good plan. Wilson’s happy with it. All he has to do is grab a towel, and --
There’s no towel.
Not on the one lonely towel bar. Not on the nonexistent bath shelf. Not in the plywood cabinet under the sink. Not even in the medicine cabinet.
Wilson turns around three times, checks every possible site twice. “House!” he shouts, over the voice of, seriously, Howard Cosell.
“Yeah?” shouts House back.
“There are no towels!”
“Yep!”
House sounds too damn cheerful. There’s a thunk -- good God, that TV actually has a dial -- and then Tamra from Real Housewives is bitching about something. First confirmation that they’re still in the year 2012. Wilson shouldn’t feel relieved.
But he does.
Tamra doesn’t solve the issue of no towels, though.
Wilson sighs (deep and long), and starts putting his clothes back on. It's disgusting and almost painful, the way the cold soggy fabric drags against his skin, so very heavy, smothering any ray of cheer he'd been building up.
By the time he has his boots back on, he’s halfway to being an icicle, and seeing House cozily wrapped in the bedspread, watching Housewives throw things, only sours Wilson’s mood more.
“No, no, don't get up,” he says to House, who of course shows no inclination of doing any such thing, “I'll go see about getting us some towels, even though I feel a cough coming on.” He wants to produce a nice, big, guilt-inducing hack but all his lungs put out is a barely-there ehem. House doesn't bother looking up from the TV screen.
"There're probably a zillion bed bugs in there," he leaves as a parting shot, hoping for a little psychosomatic itching. (He wouldn't actually wish bed bugs on his worst enemy and certainly not on his best friend, dry-off-hogginess notwithstanding.)
"Zillion and one," House replies, "and all of us are toasty warm."
Bastard.
The three-doors-down trek seems to have lengthened to a half-mile, but it could just be that the clouds have darkened further. The rain's not any heavier (he thinks) but the sky's gone from pigeon feathers to charcoal.
Earth will fall into the sun before his left half dries out completely.
He pushes into the manager's office (tink tink). It's just as stuck in the '70s as the motel room, the only exception being the day-glo green t-shirt on the woman sitting behind the counter. "FRANKIE" proclaims the top of the shirt, and she seems to be taking the rest of the well-worn motto to heart ("SAYS RELAX" his brain can't help supplying), all her attention absorbed into a paperback novel.
"Excuse me," he begins, before being soundly shushed.
"Excuse me?" he tries again, with a new inflection. This time she lets out more of a zttt sound, and ducks her head closer to the paperback.
He'll never be dry. He'll freeze right here and stay frozen until such time decades in the future when he can be revived. Maybe, seeing as how this motel never left the 70s, when he’s revived it'll be early 2012 again, and he can convince House that they really should just buy another goddamn Corvette because then it'll have a goddamn roof and he can die of thymic cancer goddamn warm and goddamn dry.
"There," calls out the woman behind the counter, breaking into his thoughts and thumping her book down on the counter. "Emma's turned down Elton and good riddance to bad rubbish. Ya need somethin'?"
"There don't seem to be any towels in our room."
“They’s in the drawer,” she says, pronouncing it as “draw’r.”
Well, of course, because towels should be stored in the dresser, uh huh. “The drawer,” Wilson repeats and turns to go.
“Not the drohr,” she says, sounding as offendedly perturbed at his misinterpretation as a teenager would (or House, in one of his moods). “The drahr.”
“Drahr?” He sounds like a parrot, if a parrot could make a “d” sound (he doesn’t think one could), but damn it, he’s wet and freezing and not in the mood for word games.
“Drahr,” she quote-unquote confirms. Then sighs a very put-upon sigh. “Where you put the wet things after they’s been in the worsher?”
The dryer. Of course. He refrains from sighing (they can't both sigh; it'd use up all the oxygen) and asks as politely as he can, "Can we take some from one of the other rooms?"
"They's all in the dryer," she replies.
"All your motel's towels?"
"All of 'em'd fit."
"And the rest are?"
"Waiting for the dryer to be empty. Or in the washer." She must see his desperate and confused look, because she relents enough to clarify, "Teeter and her brood been real sick; been lotta mopping up to do."
Oh. Oh, he hadn't even thought -- "I'm a doctor; is there anything I can do to help?"
"Nah, already cleaned up, and the vet says ain't serious anyhow. They's been eating too many locusts, dumb bastards. I swear, coonhounds eat the grossest stuff and they never learn. Eat it again, puke it up again. You want one?"
He blinks. "A... locust?" he asks, going with his second thought.
She rolls her eyes. "A pup. Teeter's brood's old enough to get gone, and if I ever had any notion I wanted to keep 'em all, the last twenty-four hours have proven me otherwise. Purebloods, they got papers."
"I'm on a motorcycle."
"RQ takes dogs on his bike all the time. They like it. He carries 'em in a sling on his front like a hippie baby. Sure I got a piece of cloth around here somewhere to make you a hippie-baby puppy sling."
"Um." Of all the crazy -- wait a minute. She's got cloth. "Can we borrow one of your towels?"
Sighing, she picks up her novel again. "I told you, they's all in the dryer."
"One of your personal ones." It's hard to smile charmingly when he's practically shivering, but he gives it a shot. "I'll give you a hundred bucks."
"All. In. The. Dryer. Which one of those words do you not get? I could turn up the heat in your room a smidge for a wall." (A millisecond later, he realizes she actually said "a while.") "You boys's welcome to walk around naked; I don't care you're gay."
"We're not gay."
"I don't care you're not gay, then." Her eyes are tracking along lines of print once more, and he can tell he's about to get zttted again, and he's freezing and dripping and miserable.
Plaintively, hopelessly, fruitlessly he asks, "Isn't there anything you can do to help me?"
She looks up at him, down to his feet, then back up at his eyes again. "I might gotta old bathrobe that'd fit you."
Oh. Oh! He can take another hot shower, drip dry (or shimmy like one of Teeter's puppies and watch the droplets fly), and wrap himself in fleecy goodness. "Excellent; thank you."
Half a step closer to the counter, he's stopped by her voice.
"Hundred bucks."
"What? A hundred dollars to buy a used bathrobe?"
"Hundred bucks to borrow a bathrobe. I'll need it back when the towels are dry."
"But..."
"You were gonna give me a hundred bucks for a towel; why not a hundred for a bathrobe?"
Amidst his confusion over a world gone mad, he notices that her eyes are completely sincere. She honestly wants to know why a bathrobe wouldn't be as valuable to him as a towel at this moment.
Because --
Because --
He doesn't have an answer.
"Does it have flowers on it?"
"Nope." She shuts her novel and sits upright. "RELAX" comes into view. "Plain gray."
"Is it flannel?"
She's halfway to a back room but calls over her shoulder, "Terry. Real thick. You'll like it."
He breaks the icy grip his back pocket has on his wallet. His fingers are fricking freezing. "I don't know if I have a hundred in cash."
"Credit's better anyhow." Her yelling voice is higher than her regular speaking voice. Wilson wonders if that's typical and he just never noticed. "Unless you got Diners or JCB. I don't take those."
He's wondering whether anyone with JCB has ever been within a hundred miles of this place -- and who has Diners Club any more -- when a pile of warm cloth hits his chest.
"Gimme your card and you c'n put that on."
Fumbling through his wallet, he imagines he can hear her smirking, but when he looks up she's just looking plainly at him.
She takes his Amex and puts it in a silver contraption. Then she pulls out what cannot be -- yes, yes, it is. It's carbon paper. Clunk clunk, and credit cards weren't popular in the 70s but if they had been, this would've been the device used to process them. Wow.
"Found some wool socks too. No extra charge."
"OK, I'll just take --"
An especially hard splatter of rain against the window soaks the plan he had for taking the (thick, snuggly) robe and (warm, toasty) socks back to the motel room. No point even trying to shelter them with his body; that's as drenched as the air outside. "Uh," he continues to the clerk, "do you have maybe a plastic bag I can have?" and waits to hear whether she'll charge him ten bucks for that, or more.
"Two days of dog vomit," she responds, and he shudders. "Ever last one's in the trash."
"Do you have --"
She slaps his credit card down on the counter and settles back into her seat behind it. "I got a restroom you can change in and a chair you can sit your ass in until the rain lets up. That's what I got."
Her nod toward the corner of the room draws his attention to said chair-to-sit-his-ass-in, two of them, in fact, low-slung club chairs covered in a worn but still hideous brown-gold-avocado plaid cloth. They look nubbly and possibly itchy and like heaven on goddamned earth.
Ten minutes later, he's warm and almost entirely dry (a hairdryer also being one of the things the motel clerk does not have) and halfway through an ancient but interesting issue of Popular Mechanics, with two more under his elbow for next, when House bursts into the room wrapped in a damp sheet, the soaked trail of which narrowly misses being caught in the door as it pulls abruptly shut.
"Hail Caesar," greets the clerk, and is met with an unamused glare.
"Is he in here?"
"Count of Monte Cristo's in the corner," she replies and tilts her head Wilson's way before returning to her novel.
Turning, House fixes Wilson with a look that is strange and yet vaguely familiar. Not anything that Wilson has seen on House's face before, but on other people's faces, at different times. The tilt of House's head has something to do with it, gaze angled down but not toward the floor; a recent memory is coming back, Wilson was relieved at the same time he saw that expression on... Mr. Tonegawa's face, that's it, last year when they found five-year-old Ken playing in the staff bathroom three floors away from his hospital room, the desperation/exhilaration/anger-at-having-been-scared combo that comes when a parent has gotten back a missing child.
"Where the hell have you been?" demands House. "I figured you'd drowned, staring up at the clouds with your mouth open like a turkey."
"That's a myth, about turkeys," Wilson points out.
"But not that you're stupid enough to do it." House's face can't seem to decide on an expression, and his voice drops lower in both octave and volume. "You didn't come back."
There isn't anything Wilson can say to that. He makes an offering instead. "Magazine? It's rumored the '82 Trans Am is going to be a beauty."
House scoffs. "With a four-cylinder, 90 horsepower engine."
"Well, we're not all perfect."
The issue's still hanging in the air (though House's hand is stretching toward it) when the clerk intervenes. "Drop the sheet."
Her arms stretched up and out, she's holding up what looks to be a poorly made quilt. When House stares at her and doesn't otherwise move, she repeats her command. "Drop the sheet unless you want the damn thing trapped under this when I wrap it round you. I'n't want you to get my chairs wet."
"Who said I --" starts House, but the quilt is going around him quickly, so he scrambles to discard the sheet. The clerk pushes House toward the second club chair and then ducks down to tug at the sheet as he falls toward the seat. House ends up swaddled chest to shins, the baby-blue check gingham and navy-and-gold striped silk around him clashing horrendously and yet somehow appropriately with the plaid chair.
Wilson hands him a Popular Mechanics. The clerk, back in her seat behind the counter, has picked up her novel again.
"Hey," Wilson asks, "aren't you going to charge him for the quilt?"
She shrugs. "Don't need to."
He's warm; House isn't bitching; all's right with the world and Wilson really shouldn't push it. But the unfairness of it is prickling along his nerves and he can't stop himself from saying, "Just going to live off the hundred dollars you extorted from me?"
Her eyes roll. "Just gonna get nosy family off my back about working when I show 'em a charge collected today. Give me two weeks, then protest it with your credit card company and I'll give you the hundred back."
And now they're back in Bizarro World. "Why would --"
House's indignation stampedes right over him. "They don't think getting an advanced degree counts as working?"
"How do you know she's getting a degree?"
House throws a scoff Wilson's way. "Nobody reads Jane Austen for fun unless they're avoiding reading something more difficult."
"People who aren't Philistines do," Wilson protests, but the clerk stops the impending argument.
"Maybe I'm a Philistine then, because he's right. Emma's a break from my masters in contemporary Chinese literature, and no, family don't count that as working. 'Not even in English,' says Aunt Ora, and what the hell kinda understanding you gonna have of a Chinese novel if you read it in English? Sissy understanding, that's what."
"Whoa, Toni," says House with a strange stress on the "ee." Wilson wonders how House knows the clerk's name and whether maybe the accent in this area is contagious.
Snorting, the clerk goes back to her novel. "Said I read Chinese; didn't say I understood it spoken. Maybe next masters."
Wilson's even more confused. "That was Chinese?"
"Yup," House says, sinking lower into his seat and raising his magazine to eye level. "Mandarin for 'I agree.'"
"Know any more?" the clerk asks idly.
"Do you want an advanced degree in conversing with hookers?"
"I'll take that as a no. So hush ya mouth. That's English for shut the hell up."
"Make me," House challenges.
The visual standoff, glare matching glare, ojo-a-ojo lasts long enough for Wilson to start formulating an escape route. But it's broken by the whir and plop of a bag of lollipops flying into House's lap. "They ya go."
A small smile forms on House's face as he gazes at the back-to-her-paperback clerk, but he's observant enough to smack at Wilson's hand as he tries to sneak a lollipop. "I get first dibs." They tussle, but both end up with a fair amount -- which is to say Wilson gets about four while House gets the rest -- and that's enough to keep them occupied until the weather turns better and the drahr is finally free.
Author: Dee Laundry
Characters: House, Wilson, OC
Rating: PG
Words: 3392
Summary: Wilson and House wait out the rain.
Notes: Spoilers for the last several episodes of House. Thank you to
nightdog_barks for betaing her own gift. This is for her. ♥
“The thing about motorcycles,” Wilson thinks to himself, “is that they don’t have roofs.”
The downpour started twenty minutes ago, when they were a half-hour outside of the last tiny town they’d seen, and in those twenty minutes, they haven’t seen another tiny town, or a building, or even a bridge to wait the rain out under. Wilson is soaked to the bones, “wetter than a jellyfish,” as his Gran used to say, and House doesn’t look any better off.
He’s starting to get worried that the sand and dust will float right over the road (he has no idea how quicksand is truly formed, but loose detritus plus pounding rain seems as likely a formula as anything), and can’t decide whether to gun it or stop completely and let the clouds pass. House has other ideas, however, and pulls off onto -- oh.
There’s a motel by the side of the road. Wilson hadn’t seen it, which actually isn’t surprising given the worn, beaten grey-brown color of everything involved with the place. The parking lot, the low-slung building, the roof, the windows… they all are the same ancient shade.
By the time he gets his kickstand down, House has already taken off toward what looks to be the motel office. No sign that Wilson can see, unless that dark gray smudge in the far window is a sign, but the door is the only one in the row of -- Wilson counts -- seven that has a bell hanging over it.
The bell tinks as House goes in (the sound is definitely a “tink,” not a ring) and Wilson huddles under the not-very-over overhang by the nearest motel room. He’s still soaked, and freezing, but there are no weird noises coming from any of the rooms, so a sliver of gratitude for the shelter seems in order.
In just a few minutes, House comes back out, helmet tucked under his left arm, and a real metal key attached to a gigantic diamond-shaped piece of plastic dangling from his other hand. House nods toward the door two down from where Wilson’s standing, and Wilson is there in less than a blink.
He hates being this wet.
The room looks like a motel room Wilson could’ve stayed in as a young child -- literally. The furniture, carpet, artwork, TV, and bedspread seem to have been here since the 1970s. He hopes the sheets have been changed since then, at least. He hopes.
“There’s only one bed,” he points out to House, who’s gone into the bathroom.
“You really want to spend the night here?” House retorts, his voice seeming to bounce off the tile.
Point to House. It’s only two in the afternoon and surely the rain will stop soon. They can just get dry, and --
House is naked.
Wilson blinks. The situation stays the same.
House is completely naked: no shirt, no underwear, no socks, nothing. And he’s walking around the room like it’s an everyday thing, being naked. Which, Wilson supposes, is an everyday thing, given that House does shower and/or bathe regularly, but it’s not every day that he does it so insouciantly in front of Wilson. In fact, it is no days that House is naked in front of Wilson insouciantly.
No days. Approximately the same frequency with which Wilson uses the word ‘insouciantly,’ so…
“Put a damn towel on, House, geez!”
“Willikers, Wilson,” House replies in a goofy, no, Goofy voice. “Donald Duck doesn’t wear pants, so why do I gotta? Yuk, yuk!”
Wilson rolls his eyes and flees to the bathroom. Not flees. Manfully strides.
House is right about one thing; the wet clothes have to go. After carefully shutting the door behind himself (because he can handle House’s nudity if it’s one room over), he kicks his boots to the corner of the bathroom, on top of House’s, and peels off the layers of sodden fabric. Ugh. He’ll have a quick shower, and a long dry, and then go see about finding somewhere they can get their clothes clean.
There’s no shampoo in the tub and the soap smells like wood. The water is hot, though, and the 1970s showerhead has never even heard the word ‘low-flow’ so it’s all good. Wilson has some of his optimism back. He’s clean; he’s out of the rain; House has, by the sound of things, found a re-run of a football game on TV. Wilson won’t even bother looking for a Laundromat. They can just hang out in their towels for a while, and throw their clothes over the radiator and in front of the oscillating fan Wilson noticed in the room.
It’s a good plan. Wilson’s happy with it. All he has to do is grab a towel, and --
There’s no towel.
Not on the one lonely towel bar. Not on the nonexistent bath shelf. Not in the plywood cabinet under the sink. Not even in the medicine cabinet.
Wilson turns around three times, checks every possible site twice. “House!” he shouts, over the voice of, seriously, Howard Cosell.
“Yeah?” shouts House back.
“There are no towels!”
“Yep!”
House sounds too damn cheerful. There’s a thunk -- good God, that TV actually has a dial -- and then Tamra from Real Housewives is bitching about something. First confirmation that they’re still in the year 2012. Wilson shouldn’t feel relieved.
But he does.
Tamra doesn’t solve the issue of no towels, though.
Wilson sighs (deep and long), and starts putting his clothes back on. It's disgusting and almost painful, the way the cold soggy fabric drags against his skin, so very heavy, smothering any ray of cheer he'd been building up.
By the time he has his boots back on, he’s halfway to being an icicle, and seeing House cozily wrapped in the bedspread, watching Housewives throw things, only sours Wilson’s mood more.
“No, no, don't get up,” he says to House, who of course shows no inclination of doing any such thing, “I'll go see about getting us some towels, even though I feel a cough coming on.” He wants to produce a nice, big, guilt-inducing hack but all his lungs put out is a barely-there ehem. House doesn't bother looking up from the TV screen.
"There're probably a zillion bed bugs in there," he leaves as a parting shot, hoping for a little psychosomatic itching. (He wouldn't actually wish bed bugs on his worst enemy and certainly not on his best friend, dry-off-hogginess notwithstanding.)
"Zillion and one," House replies, "and all of us are toasty warm."
Bastard.
The three-doors-down trek seems to have lengthened to a half-mile, but it could just be that the clouds have darkened further. The rain's not any heavier (he thinks) but the sky's gone from pigeon feathers to charcoal.
Earth will fall into the sun before his left half dries out completely.
He pushes into the manager's office (tink tink). It's just as stuck in the '70s as the motel room, the only exception being the day-glo green t-shirt on the woman sitting behind the counter. "FRANKIE" proclaims the top of the shirt, and she seems to be taking the rest of the well-worn motto to heart ("SAYS RELAX" his brain can't help supplying), all her attention absorbed into a paperback novel.
"Excuse me," he begins, before being soundly shushed.
"Excuse me?" he tries again, with a new inflection. This time she lets out more of a zttt sound, and ducks her head closer to the paperback.
He'll never be dry. He'll freeze right here and stay frozen until such time decades in the future when he can be revived. Maybe, seeing as how this motel never left the 70s, when he’s revived it'll be early 2012 again, and he can convince House that they really should just buy another goddamn Corvette because then it'll have a goddamn roof and he can die of thymic cancer goddamn warm and goddamn dry.
"There," calls out the woman behind the counter, breaking into his thoughts and thumping her book down on the counter. "Emma's turned down Elton and good riddance to bad rubbish. Ya need somethin'?"
"There don't seem to be any towels in our room."
“They’s in the drawer,” she says, pronouncing it as “draw’r.”
Well, of course, because towels should be stored in the dresser, uh huh. “The drawer,” Wilson repeats and turns to go.
“Not the drohr,” she says, sounding as offendedly perturbed at his misinterpretation as a teenager would (or House, in one of his moods). “The drahr.”
“Drahr?” He sounds like a parrot, if a parrot could make a “d” sound (he doesn’t think one could), but damn it, he’s wet and freezing and not in the mood for word games.
“Drahr,” she quote-unquote confirms. Then sighs a very put-upon sigh. “Where you put the wet things after they’s been in the worsher?”
The dryer. Of course. He refrains from sighing (they can't both sigh; it'd use up all the oxygen) and asks as politely as he can, "Can we take some from one of the other rooms?"
"They's all in the dryer," she replies.
"All your motel's towels?"
"All of 'em'd fit."
"And the rest are?"
"Waiting for the dryer to be empty. Or in the washer." She must see his desperate and confused look, because she relents enough to clarify, "Teeter and her brood been real sick; been lotta mopping up to do."
Oh. Oh, he hadn't even thought -- "I'm a doctor; is there anything I can do to help?"
"Nah, already cleaned up, and the vet says ain't serious anyhow. They's been eating too many locusts, dumb bastards. I swear, coonhounds eat the grossest stuff and they never learn. Eat it again, puke it up again. You want one?"
He blinks. "A... locust?" he asks, going with his second thought.
She rolls her eyes. "A pup. Teeter's brood's old enough to get gone, and if I ever had any notion I wanted to keep 'em all, the last twenty-four hours have proven me otherwise. Purebloods, they got papers."
"I'm on a motorcycle."
"RQ takes dogs on his bike all the time. They like it. He carries 'em in a sling on his front like a hippie baby. Sure I got a piece of cloth around here somewhere to make you a hippie-baby puppy sling."
"Um." Of all the crazy -- wait a minute. She's got cloth. "Can we borrow one of your towels?"
Sighing, she picks up her novel again. "I told you, they's all in the dryer."
"One of your personal ones." It's hard to smile charmingly when he's practically shivering, but he gives it a shot. "I'll give you a hundred bucks."
"All. In. The. Dryer. Which one of those words do you not get? I could turn up the heat in your room a smidge for a wall." (A millisecond later, he realizes she actually said "a while.") "You boys's welcome to walk around naked; I don't care you're gay."
"We're not gay."
"I don't care you're not gay, then." Her eyes are tracking along lines of print once more, and he can tell he's about to get zttted again, and he's freezing and dripping and miserable.
Plaintively, hopelessly, fruitlessly he asks, "Isn't there anything you can do to help me?"
She looks up at him, down to his feet, then back up at his eyes again. "I might gotta old bathrobe that'd fit you."
Oh. Oh! He can take another hot shower, drip dry (or shimmy like one of Teeter's puppies and watch the droplets fly), and wrap himself in fleecy goodness. "Excellent; thank you."
Half a step closer to the counter, he's stopped by her voice.
"Hundred bucks."
"What? A hundred dollars to buy a used bathrobe?"
"Hundred bucks to borrow a bathrobe. I'll need it back when the towels are dry."
"But..."
"You were gonna give me a hundred bucks for a towel; why not a hundred for a bathrobe?"
Amidst his confusion over a world gone mad, he notices that her eyes are completely sincere. She honestly wants to know why a bathrobe wouldn't be as valuable to him as a towel at this moment.
Because --
Because --
He doesn't have an answer.
"Does it have flowers on it?"
"Nope." She shuts her novel and sits upright. "RELAX" comes into view. "Plain gray."
"Is it flannel?"
She's halfway to a back room but calls over her shoulder, "Terry. Real thick. You'll like it."
He breaks the icy grip his back pocket has on his wallet. His fingers are fricking freezing. "I don't know if I have a hundred in cash."
"Credit's better anyhow." Her yelling voice is higher than her regular speaking voice. Wilson wonders if that's typical and he just never noticed. "Unless you got Diners or JCB. I don't take those."
He's wondering whether anyone with JCB has ever been within a hundred miles of this place -- and who has Diners Club any more -- when a pile of warm cloth hits his chest.
"Gimme your card and you c'n put that on."
Fumbling through his wallet, he imagines he can hear her smirking, but when he looks up she's just looking plainly at him.
She takes his Amex and puts it in a silver contraption. Then she pulls out what cannot be -- yes, yes, it is. It's carbon paper. Clunk clunk, and credit cards weren't popular in the 70s but if they had been, this would've been the device used to process them. Wow.
"Found some wool socks too. No extra charge."
"OK, I'll just take --"
An especially hard splatter of rain against the window soaks the plan he had for taking the (thick, snuggly) robe and (warm, toasty) socks back to the motel room. No point even trying to shelter them with his body; that's as drenched as the air outside. "Uh," he continues to the clerk, "do you have maybe a plastic bag I can have?" and waits to hear whether she'll charge him ten bucks for that, or more.
"Two days of dog vomit," she responds, and he shudders. "Ever last one's in the trash."
"Do you have --"
She slaps his credit card down on the counter and settles back into her seat behind it. "I got a restroom you can change in and a chair you can sit your ass in until the rain lets up. That's what I got."
Her nod toward the corner of the room draws his attention to said chair-to-sit-his-ass-in, two of them, in fact, low-slung club chairs covered in a worn but still hideous brown-gold-avocado plaid cloth. They look nubbly and possibly itchy and like heaven on goddamned earth.
Ten minutes later, he's warm and almost entirely dry (a hairdryer also being one of the things the motel clerk does not have) and halfway through an ancient but interesting issue of Popular Mechanics, with two more under his elbow for next, when House bursts into the room wrapped in a damp sheet, the soaked trail of which narrowly misses being caught in the door as it pulls abruptly shut.
"Hail Caesar," greets the clerk, and is met with an unamused glare.
"Is he in here?"
"Count of Monte Cristo's in the corner," she replies and tilts her head Wilson's way before returning to her novel.
Turning, House fixes Wilson with a look that is strange and yet vaguely familiar. Not anything that Wilson has seen on House's face before, but on other people's faces, at different times. The tilt of House's head has something to do with it, gaze angled down but not toward the floor; a recent memory is coming back, Wilson was relieved at the same time he saw that expression on... Mr. Tonegawa's face, that's it, last year when they found five-year-old Ken playing in the staff bathroom three floors away from his hospital room, the desperation/exhilaration/anger-at-having-been-scared combo that comes when a parent has gotten back a missing child.
"Where the hell have you been?" demands House. "I figured you'd drowned, staring up at the clouds with your mouth open like a turkey."
"That's a myth, about turkeys," Wilson points out.
"But not that you're stupid enough to do it." House's face can't seem to decide on an expression, and his voice drops lower in both octave and volume. "You didn't come back."
There isn't anything Wilson can say to that. He makes an offering instead. "Magazine? It's rumored the '82 Trans Am is going to be a beauty."
House scoffs. "With a four-cylinder, 90 horsepower engine."
"Well, we're not all perfect."
The issue's still hanging in the air (though House's hand is stretching toward it) when the clerk intervenes. "Drop the sheet."
Her arms stretched up and out, she's holding up what looks to be a poorly made quilt. When House stares at her and doesn't otherwise move, she repeats her command. "Drop the sheet unless you want the damn thing trapped under this when I wrap it round you. I'n't want you to get my chairs wet."
"Who said I --" starts House, but the quilt is going around him quickly, so he scrambles to discard the sheet. The clerk pushes House toward the second club chair and then ducks down to tug at the sheet as he falls toward the seat. House ends up swaddled chest to shins, the baby-blue check gingham and navy-and-gold striped silk around him clashing horrendously and yet somehow appropriately with the plaid chair.
Wilson hands him a Popular Mechanics. The clerk, back in her seat behind the counter, has picked up her novel again.
"Hey," Wilson asks, "aren't you going to charge him for the quilt?"
She shrugs. "Don't need to."
He's warm; House isn't bitching; all's right with the world and Wilson really shouldn't push it. But the unfairness of it is prickling along his nerves and he can't stop himself from saying, "Just going to live off the hundred dollars you extorted from me?"
Her eyes roll. "Just gonna get nosy family off my back about working when I show 'em a charge collected today. Give me two weeks, then protest it with your credit card company and I'll give you the hundred back."
And now they're back in Bizarro World. "Why would --"
House's indignation stampedes right over him. "They don't think getting an advanced degree counts as working?"
"How do you know she's getting a degree?"
House throws a scoff Wilson's way. "Nobody reads Jane Austen for fun unless they're avoiding reading something more difficult."
"People who aren't Philistines do," Wilson protests, but the clerk stops the impending argument.
"Maybe I'm a Philistine then, because he's right. Emma's a break from my masters in contemporary Chinese literature, and no, family don't count that as working. 'Not even in English,' says Aunt Ora, and what the hell kinda understanding you gonna have of a Chinese novel if you read it in English? Sissy understanding, that's what."
"Whoa, Toni," says House with a strange stress on the "ee." Wilson wonders how House knows the clerk's name and whether maybe the accent in this area is contagious.
Snorting, the clerk goes back to her novel. "Said I read Chinese; didn't say I understood it spoken. Maybe next masters."
Wilson's even more confused. "That was Chinese?"
"Yup," House says, sinking lower into his seat and raising his magazine to eye level. "Mandarin for 'I agree.'"
"Know any more?" the clerk asks idly.
"Do you want an advanced degree in conversing with hookers?"
"I'll take that as a no. So hush ya mouth. That's English for shut the hell up."
"Make me," House challenges.
The visual standoff, glare matching glare, ojo-a-ojo lasts long enough for Wilson to start formulating an escape route. But it's broken by the whir and plop of a bag of lollipops flying into House's lap. "They ya go."
A small smile forms on House's face as he gazes at the back-to-her-paperback clerk, but he's observant enough to smack at Wilson's hand as he tries to sneak a lollipop. "I get first dibs." They tussle, but both end up with a fair amount -- which is to say Wilson gets about four while House gets the rest -- and that's enough to keep them occupied until the weather turns better and the drahr is finally free.